How To Plan & Strategize Your Marketing Efforts To Increase Holiday Sales Post Pandemic?

What’s your idea to increase Holiday Sales? 
How do you plan your eCommerce holiday sales marketing efforts?

This year, the eCommerce industry is in full swing with the holiday cheers on one hand while stress planning the strategies to stay safe from the huge pandemic situations on the other hand.

The eCommerce holiday sales season is crucially important for customers and eCommerce store owners too. Holiday sales, festive promotions & marketing campaigns are planned everywhere during this period. It is an engaging period for eCommerce retailers. These are the days to – 

• Boost Sales And Marketing Activities
• Retain Customers
• Building Brand Loyalty
• Defining Strategic Plans
• Targeting Potential Customers

etc… etc…

The data from emarketer reveals the periodic growth of retail sales during the holiday season between 2016-2021. Though the pandemic has hit the market severely, there is still a visible growth in % change and % of total holiday retail sales in 2020. Considering the results of the 2020 holiday sales market, 2021 sales are predicted to bring in better performance & increased holiday sales for the eCommerce retailers.  

The holiday season is full of opportunities. To leverage the best results from these opportunities and to increase holiday sales, eCommerce retailers need proper planning and strategy building. Hence, this blog will further guide you through the three phases on how you must plan to increase holiday sales- 

• eCommerce holiday season sales plan before the season starts
• Gameplan to be followed during the final sales months, i.e., October, November, and December
• Post-sales strategies

Starting with the Pre-season planning phase and strategies to increase sales post-pandemic, let’s see what market is ready to adapt and what you’re ready to offer.

Phase 1. The Pre-season Planning & Strategy to Increase Holiday Sales

The most common mistake that every marketer does: 

Build their holiday sales promotion campaign targeting the season. 

But, what about pre-season sales and post-season promotions? 

Every marketer creates unique strategies every year to surpass its earlier sales. Promoting sales in the holiday season fetches great results in terms of revenue and new customers. 

But when should you start with phase 1?

You’ll never find the best time for planning your eCommerce Holiday sales campaign. It’s never too early or too late. It all depends on how well you plan and how gracefully you manage the campaigns. Considering the top marketer’s theories, it is recommended to start your planning at least 3 months before your targeted holiday sales. 

1. Build Your Strategy to Proceed with the Planning

A. Review Your Previous Holiday Sales Promotion Results

1. Measure Your Holiday Business
   1. Revenue generated
   2. Margin levied for coupons, discounts, promotional offers, etc.
   3. Number of views received on your holiday sales offer page/landing page
   4. Track down your website traffic segmented into various social channels
2. Analyze Your Total Customer Base  
   1. New customers
   2. Old customers
   3. At-risk customers
   4. Reactivated customers
   5. Customers from organic & paid sources
   6. Referrals
3. Track Your Campaigns
   1. Check CTRs
   2. Monitor Average Order Value
   3. Observe the Ads performance 
   4. Review the number of coupons redeemed out of total coupons rewarded
   5. Evaluate your revenue against the number of clicks and impressions witnessed throughout the campaign
   6. Check conversion rate and the total number of conversions
4. Check Multidimensional Phases For Actual Revenue Analysis
   1. Product type
   2. Demographic details
   3. Seasonal sale data
   4. Featured Ads data

B. Analyze Decisions Taken With Results Achieved Using Tools

• SWOT Analysis
• Cost-Benefit Analysis
• Decision-Tree Analysis
• Expert Analysis
• Market-Basket Analysis

C. Upgrade Your Strategies

• Revise the placement of your products 
• Define product costs and offers peculiarly
• Leverage the benefits of email marketing and automated business processes
• Level-up your customer reward system
• Check your loyalty program’s point system
• Reward customers with holiday gifts that provide value to your business
• Conducting customer retention activities
• Target your customers through their Wishlists

2. Call Back Your Vulnerable Customers To Generate Value From Them

Not all your customers are regular. Does it mean to not target them? Of course not. Your seasonal customers should be your priority for retargeting.

Three months before holiday sales, you have sufficient time to reconnect with your “At-risk” and “Seasonal” customers. These customers are the most under-rated loyal customers. Because they always turn up to you every season to shop for their special ones. Offer them your personalized gift cards, with irresistible offers and discounts.

Float emails offering them to be an early bird shopper to avail of the best offers. Try to convince them to join your loyalty program for additional benefits. Provide pricing points on product, redeemable in the form of coupons, and price-drop on next cart value. Offer them to participate in social games and contests organized on your social handles for more exciting rewards like “Spin the Wheel”, “Lucky Number Draw”, etc. Any creative strategy that is targeting & converting is good to go. 

3. Word of Mouth Promotions

Every business holds a set of customers for its goodwill. This set of customers are real advocates. They trust your brand and products and will always voice up in your favor. 

Ask them to share their reviews and they’ll be happy to provide their suggestions too. You can popularize your loyalty program through them. The customers with such strong passions for products usually spread the benefits of the products among their groups. 

Here, you need to target them emotionally. Convince them to refer your products to their friends and relatives through your referral program. You can initiate this step approximately two months before your campaign.

Anyways, these days whatever a marketer says is considered as some sort of promotional activity. In such scenarios, if your elite customers float out their “word of mouth” among their networks, it will surely fetch you a convinced audience.

4. Bond-In With Your Loyal Customers

As I have mentioned earlier in my blog on customer loyalty that only awarding points to customers and making them redeem the points is not enough. And therefore, a month before your campaign, you need to develop a relationship with your loyal customers. and keep pushing in efforts to maintain the relationship for long.

To do so, you can organize an event for all your loyal customers. In this way, they’ll have the opportunity to connect with your other customers too. This will, hence, help you in building your community. You can even lend out special offers or personalized gifts for your customers on their special occasions.

Building strategic plans along with learning from previous experiences is a must. The point of consideration here is to have a deep look at the metrics and dimensions considered for building strategies before you head on to the second phase of implementation. 

Phase 2. The Implementation Period – The Final Sales Quarter

Although revenue is not the only parameter to mark the efficiency of your eCommerce holiday sales campaign; it is one easy to analyze metric. But your eCommerce holiday sales campaign should cover every aspect of business growth. 

For the Holiday season, you already have your strategy and plan build. Following this section, we’ll now have a look at the plan and strategies that you must focus on during the last sales quarter of the year, i.e., the months of October, November, and December.

1. Increase Holiday Sales in October

The month of October starts with the celebration bells of Columbus Day and ends with the spooky Holloween’s Celebrations. This month is comparatively light since only two festivals take a toll on the October sales calendar. 

Columbus Day is a federal holiday which means the government offices and financial markets remain closed on this day. It is not widely celebrated in the US but it is particularly celebrated in the Northeast. On this day people do church services and other activities.

Halloween is one of the biggest Holidays in the US which originated in Ireland. Traditionally Halloween was celebrated on 31 October. On this day young and old people wear scary costumes. People participate in the Halloween-themed party, kids take part in the costumes of trick or treat, games and pranks.

So here is your gameplan for eCommerce Holiday Sales in October –

• Use social media channels and email marketing for the promotion
• Create popups that display the offers you want to provide to your customers
• Create a special sale for Columbus Day
• Give your website a scary Halloween look and feel
• Prepare and start selling your Halloween deals at least 2-3 weeks before the Halloween Day  
• Don’t forget to optimize your website for mobile
• Create enticing and fostering offers to your loyal customers
• Create personalized content on social media on the occasion of Halloween. 

2. Increase Holiday Sales in November

November is the month of festivals. Election Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday capture the market sales promotion activities with the moods and joy of giftings.

Your game plan for holiday sales in November is going to be hectic and will keep you on your toes with the following tips – 

• Provide special offers to the family of Veterans
• Include links to the organizations in your blog post that supports the family of Veterans
• Donate a portion of sales to an organization
• Reward the customers that donate something to the organization you support
• Target your customers based on the RFM segmentation analysis
• Collaborate with other companies to sell your product in the marketplace
• Create a buzz on social media channels  
• Prepare your content strategy 2 weeks before the start of Thanksgiving Day
• Target an email list of users to whom you want to offer discounts and rewards based on the last year shopping behavior
• Create banner images to entice customers towards Black Friday deals
• Check whether your website can handle the load or not for the biggest shopping day
• Create scarcity in the mind of the audience for instance- SALE on Black Friday is COMING SOON
• Don’t forget to include cart abandonment recovery strategies in advance
• Create promotion on Black Friday on platforms like social media and email marketing
• Make your site mobile friendly
• Check how much time your site takes to load
• Inform your customers about the special deals for Cyber Monday
• Take advantage of the social media platform
• Give your website a Cyber Monday look and feel
• Prepare your cart recovery strategy in advance
• Aware customers towards the event of Cyber Monday by writing a blog post, ebooks and by making an eye-catchy infographic

3. Increase Holiday Sales in December

December brings along the winter breeze and the excitement to welcome the new year soon. But before the jingle bells of Christmas start ringing, the month of December also celebrates the shopping FOMO with Green Monday, the second-biggest online shopping festival.

December announces the year-end sales a little earlier than actual year-end dates because people prefer to shop beforehand. Thereby the following gameplan will be most suited for any eCommerce business to promote sales in December – 

• Prepare your Green Monday deals in advance
• Tell your customers about the offers/discounts through social media ads and email marketing
• Check whether your website is working properly or not before the start of the sale
• Give your website a Christmas Day look and feel by changing the cover page according to Christmas
• Create content that generates scarcity in the mind of the target audience
• Reward your loyal customers by offering them special offers
• Surprise your customers by extending the sale
• Your servers should handle the site traffic
• Provide offers to your customers before other sites
• Send emails to your target audience to create brand awareness and loyalty
• Use social platforms that bring high conversion rates for your company

The holiday shopping season ends here. As an eCommerce marketer, you have done your level best. And now it’s time to sit and analyze whether you have achieved the targets or not. And it’s time to start planning about the post-holiday season sales.

Phase 3. The Post-Holiday Season Sales Plans

Although holiday sales come to an end with New Year celebrations, there’s always a scope to approach your customers with post-season offers and deals. Also, post-season plans to increase holiday sales are more about retaining new customers for the next season and increasing the lifetime value. 

1. Increase Customer Lifetime Value

• Decrease your churn rate by providing easy onboarding processes
• Increase customer engagement through quality content
• Provide 24×7 customer support and instant chat/ call support
• Listen to what your customers have to say
  • Take their feedback
  • Suggestions for improvements
  • Provide knowledge base to sort out their doubts and queries
• Build a relationship and keep making efforts to maintain it

2. Make Your Customers Your PROMOTERS

• Reward price points to your customers for purchasing from you in the festive season
• Ask them to post their reviews and experience on your social handles (indirect marketing). This will also increase the engagement rate on your social platforms
• If you have physical stores too, promote retail sales with end-season sales and more
• Provide referral offers to your customers and their referrals

3. Post-Holiday Sales Promotion Strategies

• Extend sale till year-end
• Provide coupons and gift cards in the festive season for post-season shopping
• Target mobile shoppers
• Initiate lucky draw for mobile and desktop shoppers
• Re-target your abandoned shopping carts with cross-selling, upsell, or down-sell. Make sure to consider the cart items and your business returns.
• Captivate the information of the users. Re-confirm the details post-sales for the ones who have ticked the product as “Gift” while purchasing.

Keep Your Customers Engaged Always!

It is not necessary to keep your customers always purchasing something from you. That’s not the only important thing anymore. What’s more important in today’s marketing is the connection and interaction between you and your customers.

It’s unavoidable that markets all over the world are deeply impacted by the pandemic. The expenditure limits of customers/shoppers have also gone down in the 2020 sales season as compared to that of 2019. However, there’s still hope and better performance predictions for marketers in 2021 to increase holiday sales. 

In such scenarios, building Loyalty Programs for your customers is definitely a trusted approach to keep your customers in the loop. It makes your customers feel more humane and naive towards you. You need to conquer the emotions of your customers while promoting your sales. Keep practicing new and innovative approaches for your loyalty programs. And start attaining the benefits from them.

To increase your holiday sales further, be peculiar with your planning and strategizing phase as they hold the utmost importance. For more holiday sales ideas, marketing strategies, and holiday selling tips, explore other holiday and festive blogs from us @MakeWebBetter Blogs.

Happy Holiday Sales!